通过辅助变量提升公平性,让模型预测不因敏感属性变化而改变。
Towards counterfactual fairness through auxiliary variables
- 引入辅助变量捕捉敏感属性的内在特征,构建因果推理框架。
- 在合成与真实数据集上,公平性优于现有最先进方法。
- 适合关注算法公平性与可解释性的研究者与工程师。
机器学习模型在考虑种族、性别或年龄等敏感属性时,公平性与预测准确性的平衡问题备受关注。反事实公平性要求预测结果在敏感属性的反事实变化下保持一致,是缓解社会偏见的关键。然而,现有方法常忽略敏感特征的内在信息,限制了公平性与性能的兼顾。为此,我们提出外生因果推理(EXOC)框架,利用辅助变量揭示敏感属性的内在成因。该框架显式定义辅助节点与控制节点,调控模型内部信息流,以实现反事实公平性。在合成及真实世界数据集上的评估表明,EXOC显著优于当前最先进方法。代码已公开于 https://github.com/CASE-Lab-UMD/counterfactual_fairness_2025。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The challenge of balancing fairness and predictive accuracy in machine learning models, especially when sensitive attributes such as race, gender, or age are considered, has motivated substantial research in recent years. Counterfactual fairness ensures that predictions remain consistent across counterfactual variations of sensitive attributes, which is a crucial concept in addressing societal biases. However, existing counterfactual fairness approaches usually overlook intrinsic information about sensitive features, limiting their ability to achieve fairness while simultaneously maintaining performance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce EXOgenous Causal reasoning (EXOC), a novel causal reasoning framework motivated by exogenous variables. It leverages auxiliary variables to uncover intrinsic properties that give rise to sensitive attributes. Our framework explicitly defines an auxiliary node and a control node that contribute to counterfactual fairness and control the information flow within the model. Our evaluation, conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets, validates EXOC's superiority, showing that it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in achieving counterfactual fairness. Our code is available at https://github.com/CASE-Lab-UMD/counterfactual_fairness_2025.
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